MicroStrategy 10 - the best in BI
August 17, 2015

MicroStrategy 10 - the best in BI

Mario Ferrer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Analytics Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with MicroStrategy Analytics

We're building a new data warehouse and reporting system. MicroStrategy will be at the forefront of our strategy, providing a robust, multi-language, multi-tenant architecture for our customers and internally. It replaces our Excel, CSV based reporting company-wide.
  • Without a doubt, it scales, it is robust and the performance is great.
  • The latest enhancements for version 10 (like replacing Flash with HTML 5) address some previous issues and concerns.
  • They've closed the gap they had with Tableau and similar products with the introduction of Desktop, while still providing governed, data discovery. Something Tableau lacks.
  • It is hard for me to point out room for improvement. Version 10 just came out and I haven't had the chance to fully experiment with it, but it looks very good so far.
I found Birst to be a good tool when using perfectly normalized data, like they do on their demo. If your data or model are not perfect, the tool doesn't automatically figure out anything, so you have to do a lot of manual work. Also, the tool is not mature enough. For instance, one has to manually create and maintain different projects for language support. In other words, you need to make a copy of your base project and manually translate all objects to another language, so if you wish to offer 10 languages, you need 10 versions of the same thing. That's a nightmare to maintain.
MicroStrategy is one of the "legacy" BI vendors, but they have managed to keep up with the new entrants and even innovate. I believe this is the best BI technology, and unless they came up with ridiculous pricing, we should renew.
For us, multi-language, multi-tenant were some key features, but obviously many questions come to mind, depending on the needs, such as platform, big data support, data-blending, data-mashups, language, customizations, etc.

MicroStrategy Analytics Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
10
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
9
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
10
Report sharing and collaboration
10
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
10
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10